Archives for July 2015

"Home is a place where the nondescript is sanctified as its necessary place in a system, where sublimity and predictability coincide, and moral grandeur results from the combination of alertness with incapacity for boredom in boring surroundings." Robert Harbison "Thus neurosis exhibits the quest for novelty, but underlying it, at the level of the instincts, is the compulsion to repeat. In man, the neurotic animal, the instinctual compulsion to repeat turns into into its opposite, the quest for novelty, and the unconscious aim of the quest for novelty is repetition." Norman O. Brown "I had a sort of mania for the cinema at that time—I went once or twice a day instead of doing … [Read more...]

"Today, Americans would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow, they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all people of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil….individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by their world government.” Henry Kissinger, 1992 "Long live Christ the King." Reverend H.E.B. Nye Church of England, 1933 "Communists are the vultures who scent the corpse of humanity from afar." Reverend H.E.B. … [Read more...]

"The unconscious too easily appears to be a thing we speak about, while actually it speaks in its specific way and with its specific syntax." Octave Mannoni "And how can one be sure, in such darkness." Beckett "The Unnamable" "The problem for critical thought, now, is how to make reality break in on the mind that masters it. For what we are involved in, that’s the one praxis. And the puzzle of this praxis is shaped in realizing that while reality must be made to break in on the mind, that can’t occur in the model of tossing a stone through a window; the window must shatter under its own fissuring tinsel pressures, from within, as a violence against the violence." Robert … [Read more...]

"When an individual becomes over-involved in a topic of conversation, others are drawn from the talk to the talker. One man's eagerness is another man's alienation. Readiness to become over-involved is a form of tyranny practiced by children, prima donnas and lords, placing feelings above moral rules that should have made society safe for interaction.” Erving Goffman "If Freud was 'conservative' in his immediate disregard of society, his concepts are radical in their pursuit of society where it allegedly does not exist: in the privacy of the individual. Freud undid the primal bourgeois distinction between private and public, the individual and society; he unearthed the objective roots of … [Read more...]

"...the logic of the simulacrum, with its transformation of older realities into television images, does more than merely replicate the logic of late capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it." Fredric Jameson "The question is, to know what we want. If we are prepared for war, plagues, famine, and massacres, we don't even need to say so, all we have to do is carry on." Antonin Artaud The ironic is, today, I am coming to see, a sort of delivery device for white supremacist thinking, which term itself is often problematic. But the colonial mind set has never left white society in the West. Nor anywhere, I suppose. The resistance to letting go of white control of … [Read more...]